Automaton

PHOTO: Boyce Thompson Institute

Take a moth during its pupal stage. Insert electrodes and a control chip into it. Wait a few days. The result? An unmanned aerial vehicle, of course!

Turning moths (or pigeons, rats, beetles, bees, and sharks, for that matter) into remote controlled cyborg critters has long been a goal of mad scientists and DARPA program managers.

Spectrum's Sally Adee reports on the latest initiatives of DARPA's HI-MEMS, or Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project. (I guess the name says it all.)

According to Adee, researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, in Ithaca, N.Y. -- one of the contractors on the HI-MEMS project -- are making progress toward their goal of growing MEMS-insect hybrids. In a paper presented at IEEE MEMS 2009, Adee writes, they describe "silicon neural interfaces for gas sensors that were inserted into insects during the pupal phase." The idea is that the moths could carry such sensors during search-and-rescue and reconnaissance missions.

PHOTO: Boyce Thompson Institute

Meanwhile, at MIT -- another HI-MEMS contractor -- researchers are working on a low-power ultrawide-band radio and a new digital baseband processor for the cyborg moths. In papers presented at IEEE ISSCC, they described how the radio chip will let a remote operator steer the moth by stimulating muscles that control flight and how the baseband chip can very quickly synchronize with wireless signals to save power.

So, when the creepy cyborg critters come to life, so to speak, how does DARPA plan to gauge its capabilities? Writes Adee:

To be considered successful, the final HI-MEMS cybernetic bug must fly 100 meters from a starting point and then be steered into a controlled landing within 5 meters of a specified end point. On landing, the insect must stay in place.

For your mid-week entertainment, you may enjoy this Daily Show clip from last night, where Samantha Bee interviews Colin Angle of iRobot and Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield.

Georgia Tech's SandBot is helping researchers understand how creatures like crabs can move across sandy terrain. Image: Daniel Goldman/Georgia Tech

Spiders and crabs can scurry rapidly on sand and dirt. Geckos and cockroaches can move nimbly over bark, leaves, and grass. How do these creatures do that? And can we copy them to design agile robots?

Daniel Goldman and his colleagues at Georgia Tech may have the answer. At the CRAB Lab (Complex Rheology and Biomechanics Laboratory), Goldman combines physics, biology, and robotics to investigate "rapid locomotion on sparse substrates with low foothold probability." Translation: they study how myriad creatures like lizards, cockroaches, and, yes, crabs, navigate challenging terrain, trying to understand the principles of locomotion.

The researchers report some of their results in a paper titled "Sensitive dependence of the motion of a legged robot on granular media," which appeared this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). [Download the PDF here. See the press release here.]

In their experiments, they used a small robot with six legs that rotate independently. They call it the SandBot. They put the robot, designed by Haldun Komsuoglu and Daniel Koditschek at the University of Pennsylvania, on a bed of granular media (poppy seeds!). Tiny holes in the bottom of this bed trackway blow air, creating a loosely packed material whose density the researchers could adjust.

They made the robot traverse the track, testing different terrain densities and rotational speeds for the legs. One of the interesting findings is that if the legs move too fast, the robot just thrashes around -- what the researchers call "slow swimming." By carefully adjusting the rotational speed of the legs, however, the researchers were able to make the robot move fast, without skipping in place.

The Georgia Tech team says their work could help biologists studying animal locomotion and also roboticists trying to design better limbs for complex terrain. Their insight could prove useful in applications like space exploration and search-and-rescue missions. Or running on the beach.

PS: Goldman is preparing an in-depth article on this work for Spectrum's April issue.

The EU-funded IQ Project has endowed a laboratory robot with innovative data mining and knowledge discovery techniques in a step towards automating the scientific process. The resulting "robot scientist" is the first computer system capable of originating its own experiments, physically performing them, interpreting the results and then repeating the cycle (see press release).

Endowing robots with advanced artificial intelligence and data mining techniques is of great interest in genomics, where data are being generated much faster than they can be effectively analyzed. Currently, when a new drug is sought pharmacological researchers conduct a blind study of tens or hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds to relate the structure of a chemical compound to its pharmacological activity.

Exhaustive testing like this is time-consuming, costly and generally has to be repeated each time a new drug is sought. The robot scientist holds great promise to significantly reduce the time and cost of new drug discovery.

A 2004 Nature article by the same group highlighted the concept behind the current prototype. The robot will now be put to work at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth to search for compounds that could be effective in treating malaria and schistosomiasis, so-called Third World diseases that are the focus of only limited research by commercial drug companies.

Source: ICT Results

Tonight MIT students in the class 6.270 will be competing with their autonomous robots. 6.270 was a course designed to give Course 6ers (electrical engineering/computer science) a chance to have a similar competition as the infamous 2.007 course designed by Woodie Flowers for the Course 2 kids (mechanical engineering). Over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, the students build autonomous robots to compete in a competition and the public is invited to watch the tournament.

The event is from 6 to 9 PM in Building 26. Info here.

Thanks, Neena!

(In other news, apologies for all the Boston-local event info lately... please feel free to send us events in other locales and we'll be happy to post them!)

Intuitive Surgical is a California-based company that makes teleoperated robots for minimally invasive surgery. Using a remote haptic interface, a surgeon can perform surgery using the robotic interface while small end effectors do the actual work inside a patient across the room (or on another continent). These interfaces are incredible -- they give the operator a lot of feedback for accurate control, and at the same time filter out the slight shakiness inherent in even the most steady of human hands. Children's Hospital Boston has become one of the foremost users of the DaVinci robot, with a great overview here.

This video of one of the robots creating an origami crane really wowed me -- be sure to watch it all the way through for the last few seconds. It's a great demonstration of how capable this technology is.

As a side note (and a little bit of a plug), anyone attending the Boston FIRST Regional on March 7th will have a chance to operate a DaVinci robot (an incredible opportunity) and hear a short presentation by Dr. Hiep Nguyen, Children's head of robotic surgery.

Previously:

Robot Surgery - Reassuring or Scary?

The word "robot" originated from Karel Capek's 1921 play Rossum's Universal Robots, which details the very first robot uprising. Rather than refer to mechanical men, "robot" was derived from a Czech word that means, according to different sources, labor, drudgery, forced labor, or serf. Boston-area robot geeks have the opportunity to check out a performance of RUR through the end of this week, thanks to Flat Earth Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown. Tickets are $15; check out the details.

Thanks, Daniel!

As my editor puts it, "It doesn't seem very Earth-shattering, but I do love the phrase 'meat gripper'." So without further ado, here it is -- the Meat Gripper.

Applied Robotics, a maker of "robotic end-of-arm tooling and connectivity solutions" based in Glenville, N.Y., has just announced that its Meat Gripper has been approved and certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Designed to "handle all types of meat, fish, and cheese in various forms," this pneumatic meat-loving robot is fast: the gripper opens and closes in less than 65 milliseconds -- in the blink of an eye. And connected to an Adept Quattro s650 manipulator arm, it can handle over 100 pieces of meat per minute.

Now, after making their way into car assembly lines, semiconductor fabs, and Staples's warehouses, robots can take over meat-processing plants as well.

We've covered FIRST robotics extensively in the past, so we're of course excited to talk about "Lunacy", the 2009 FRC game. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing, the FIRST Game Design Committee has designed the playing field to use low-friction materials that simulate the low gravity of the moon. The students' 120lb robots must propel themselves around this field while towing a wheeled goal into which other robots and human players are trying to throw "moon rocks". This is all a recipe for bumps, collisions, and, well, lunacy. Check out the game animation below.

In addition to the game -- which is new every year -- teams are also navigating a new control system based on National Instruments cRIO architecture [previously]. The requirements for their drive train -- the use of low-friction wheels on a low-friction playing surface -- also present an exciting challenge for drive train design, as the systems used on past playing fields (usually carpet) don't really translate to "moon gravity." Teams are currently about halfway through their build seasons, about the time that they're firming up game-specific mechanism designs and building the basics of their chassis. Interested in the technical discussions that these talented high schoolers are having? Check out the unofficial FIRST forums, Chief Delphi.

Good luck from Automaton, teams!

On Friday, WPI formally released the competition rules and regulations for the Robotics Innovation Competition and Conference. The RICC [previously] is a competition for undergraduate or graduate students that encourages them to develop a robot and accompanying business plan that solves a real-world problem -- this year the theme is "Quality of Life."

Checkout their website for all the information. Registration is free.